"Casablanca aims to make it significantly easier for C++ coders to consume and implement RESTful services. It builds on lessons from .Net, from Node.js, from Erlang and from other influencers to create a modern model that is meant to be easy to program while still being scalable, composable, and flexible."

The Visual C++ team blog explained:

Casablanca is a project to start exploring how to best support C++ developers who want to take advantage of the radical shift in software architecture that cloud computing represents.

If you are a developer writing a responsive client app, or a scalable server-side solution, where asynchrony goes hand in hand with parallelism, you should give Casablanca a try.

Support for writing native-code REST for Azure, including Visual Studio integration

Libraries for accessing Azure blob and queue storage from native clients as a first class Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) feature

A consistent and powerful model for composing asynchronous operations based on C++ 11 features

A C ++ implementation of the actor-based programming model inspired by Erlang.

A set of samples and documentation

Casablanca has a Visual Studio wizard for setup but the current release

does not provide Visual Studio 11 support for Azure since the Windows Azure SDK does not officially work for Visual Studio. Azure bindings on the Windows 8 OS and Visual Studio 11 will be supported in an upcoming release of Casablanca.